Sister Rosetta Tharpe

Just 'discovered' her a few minutes ago, wow!
Don't know anything about her. Was she around before Chuck Berry and Elvis?

 

Yes. Those earlier rockers weren't her contemporaries, she was their muse.

 

Wow, thanks, she is great. Didn't know her as an Elvis contemporary. Super cool. Thanksred.

 

She could have been huge, but her elaborate concert staging (years before The Rolling Stones) meant that her tours never made any money!

 

Love some Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Saw a documentary on her years ago, really interesting life.

 

She was the original guitar hero. Without Sister Rosetta there'd be no Chuck Berry. Look for her box set, The Original Soul Sister. Genius.

 

Decades before Chuck Berry and Elvis. She made her first recordings in 1938 after being on the gospel highway with her mother since she was a child in the 1920s. She was really the first performer to bring the new style of gospel that grew up in the sanctified denominations in the teens and '20s and '30s, into secular music when she joined Lucky Milinder's big band as a featured singer and guitarist in the early '40s, and her records backed by the Sammy Price boogie trio -- with and without her sometime partner Marie Knight -- in the mid '40s have long been looked on as kind of proto rock and roll records.

It's also interesting to note that when Lomax and Work did their surveys of what was on jukeboxes in Clarksdale in the '40s, it was mostly jump blues and jazz -- Louis Jordan, Duke Ellington, etc -- but there were also Rosetta Tharpe records on there.

You have a great road ahead of your discovering the life and music of one of American music's greatest and most important figures. You might want to seek out an short documentary that was done for PBS some years ago or Gayle Wald's biography from a few years ago. There's also a decent, but not great (too many Milinder era novelties as the expense of some stone gospel classics) single disk intro anthology called The Gospel of the Blues which is an OK jumping off point for exploring her music.

 

Yes, the first rock n roll chick with an electric as far as I know!

 

She wasn't a contemporary of Elvis. Rosetta was born in 1915 and made her first records in the late '30s. She was 20 years older than Elvis.

 

She never played rock and roll. She played gospel. She cut a couple of secular tracks with Milinder and obviously with Milinder adapted to swing backing and did gospel swing novelties like "Shout Sister Shout" and tin pan alley tunes with a gospel flavor like "The Lonesome Road," but pretty much from beginning to end she played gospel music. I know people think of the records she did with Sammy Price as kind of pointing toward rock and roll, but they are, in the end, gospel records. BTW, if anyone wants to know a little bit about where her style came from they can go back to Arizona Dranes, who played piano not guitar, but mixed Texas barrel-house piano style with sanctified church singing in the '20s.

 

I should have explained more clearly, the first 'rock n roll' attitude woman with an electric guitar.

 

She was hard core Gospel, but she pioneered in electric guitar and performance practices, which were adopted by Rock and Roll musicians. And Spirituals/Soul Gospel was a major element in the stew and amalgam of musical styles which comprise Rock & Roll. No denying this.

 

I know she’s considered the Mother of Rock n Roll or something like that. She’s cool and her stage presence is amazing.

 

Just inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year.
There’s been
Lots of attention on Sister Rosetta Tharpe

 

PBS has removed their documentary from their online archives, but I believe this is it (so catch it while you can):

 

She was definitely an original with a huge impact on gospel, on what became rock and roll, and hell, on all of American music -- Johnny Cash was quoted as calling her his favorite singer. And definitely on guitar players too. Like I said, the thing that always amazed me was that in John Work and Alan Lomax's survey of what was on jukeboxes at places like The Chicken Shack and the Dipsie Doodle in Clarksdale, MS in 1941, it's all Bing Crosby and Earl Hines and Count Basie and Louis Jordan, and it's definitely all secular music, except for Rosetta's all-time great recording of the old Tindley hymn "Stand by Me." I guess in the wee hours, when the crowd had thinned out and the hangers on were feeling lonesome and remorseful, it hit the spot. But just to know that it was getting play alongside that secular stuff tells you a lot about Rosetta's impact I think.

 

A minor side note, she was commemorated on a postage stamp back in 1998 along with some other artists.

US Stamp Gallery >> Sister Rosetta Tharpe

 

Don't be shy, don't walk by.. check this out!

 

Wouldn't you agree though that, extract the guitar solo from the first performance in that PBS documentary (post #15; I don't remember the title of the song) and you've just found the textbook of future rock and roll guitar playing and showmanship? Given that "post-Chuck Berry RnR" is such a guitar-oriented genre? On the basis of that wide (important) influence she had and of that single television performance, and unless I missed something big, I don't think I would hesitate calling her the Mother of RnR.

 

There's been talk recently of a dramatized version of her life story being made as a TV movie with Zawe Ashton showing interest. Of course she'll have to wear a mighty big coat.

 

Sister Rosetta Tharpe deserves to be a household name.
It's a tragedy she isn't.

 

I think that's too reductive. There is no mother or father of rock and roll.

Rock and roll, like most American cultural creations, is a hybrid form and inputs come from everywhere -- jump blues, and boogie woogie, and gospel and country (which has influences that come from British folk music) and bluegrass (which has its origins in minstrel show music, itself an Anglo-American facsimile/parody of African American music), etc.

No doubt her boogie single-string guitar soloing had a big impact on the early development of rock guitar. Showmanship, that was just kind of de rigeur -- Charley Patton played guitar behind his neck, every local tenor player walked the bar on a Saturday night, street corner singers did dance steps, whatever. I don't think Rosetta was unique in that regard. That's part of the performance tradition that goes way back before her and is so long standing and fundamental, I don't know where' you'd find the origins of that.

If the TV performance in question is the one where she's playing the SG, that's from TV Gospel Time in the early '60s, that's already at a point where she had influenced what was to come and what came has fed back and influenced her, that's a post-rock and roll video. That's evidence of her greatness, but not of her influence on people 10 years before. Her earlier recordings that would have literally influences other don't have that tone -- which is not to say that those records with Sammy Price with and without Marie Knight didn't influence the development of rock and roll and with their mix of boogie piano and Rosetta's guitar have similarities to Berry and Johnny Johnson. But there were other people playing guitar in church with raunchy tones and rhythms that rock borrowed -- I mean there was Utah Smith -- he used to wear giant wings on his back, had a 100 foot guitar cable so he could run down from the alter and out through the aisle of a church, it's even said he swung on a rope over the congregation sometimes, he had all the showmanship and sometimes his tone was crazy raunchy:



There was boogie and church mixing, without guitar in the hands of Arizona Dranes in the '20s.

And then there were people we never heard who played in their local churches or on street corners and juke joints in towns.

All kinds of folk practices and inputs had an impact on the different forms that emerged, and pointing to any one person is usually to miss the forest for the focus on a single tree.

Which is not so say that Rosetta wasn't an amazing artist, one of my all time favorites; It's not so say that she wasn't hugely influential and important as a singer, public figure and guitar stylist. It's not to downplay the influence she did have on exposing people outside the COGIC church to gospel or on guitar players. I agree that all of that's real and important. But I'm loath to over stress a single point of origin for these things (or on that early '60s TV clip, as awesome as it is) -- the showmanship or the guitar (it was Carl Hogan -- Louis Jordan's guitarist -- who Berry most often cited and from whom Berry literally lifted the "Johnny B. Goode" intro).

 

I’m glad that this thread includes videos. SRT is best enjoyed visually as well as aurally. A giant.

 

She’s a woman, what did you expect?